After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  The settlement buildings were not removed, but used for a military presence while the island was scoured for clues. What they found was interesting if impenetrable. Of particular note was a series of deep, overlapping, hemispherical hollows in the rock not far from the mountain’s approach road. They baffled the volcanologists and geologists to whom they were shown, who theorized about ancient exposed gas bubbles, but seemed unconvinced by their own conclusions. They also found what looked like marks on the rocks around the area that seemed to have been made by bullets, yet no bullets or shell casings could be found even after a painstaking forensic search of the area. All such researches and observations were rendered into a detailed report that was subsequently delivered by the director of the Military Intelligence Corps to the joint chiefs of staff, his counterparts in the OSS and FBI, and the senior advisor to the president. No specific executive action was sanctioned by that meeting, only increased vigilance. Between every line of the report was the ineffable sense of a narrowly dodged bullet. The brass returned to their assorted offices troubled, their awareness piqued. Presently, funds were released to special departments scattered throughout the military, intelligence, and security apparatus.

  The report, and the research that led to it, had been painstaking, but it had missed a couple pieces of evidence. It could hardly be blamed for missing either, given where they were.

  In the waters of the southern end of the eastern bay, some ten yards below the low-tide mark, lay an abandoned SA-80 assault rifle of British design and manufacture. Its magazine was almost full, and its cross-bolt safety engaged. Crabs scuttled across it and barnacles made it their home.

  On precisely the same line of longitude, approximately four hundred miles from the north pole, a frozen corpse lay on the ice. There was no way of knowing it by simple examination, but it was frozen long before it hit the ground and partially smashed upon impact. Despite the damage, it was still clearly that of a Caucasian male in his midtwenties who, antemortem, had been in good physical condition. The body had been stripped of all clothing, although, as no attempt had been made to remove fingerprints or teeth, whether this had been an attempt to conceal the dead man’s identity was unclear, but seemed unlikely. It also seemed unlikely that the man had been alive even before being frozen and dropped from a considerable height into the white desert. The top of the skull had been removed flawlessly in a smoothly curved line that ran across the occipital ridge and around the brain pan to the nasofrontal suture and around again, totally excising the frontal, parietal, and occipital bones.

  Of the brain and brain stem themselves, there was no evidence whatsoever.

  LOVECRAFT’S ART PROJECT

  There had been questioning. Dear Lord, but there had been questioning. When the remnants of the ZPE project were air-ferried out from Attu to Adak Island, there were several police officers and a federal marshal waiting for them. The marshal did some interagency voodoo that made the cops shy away and conducted all the interviews herself. Carter asked her why was she handling an investigation when that wasn’t really a marshal’s job, and she just smiled and said, “Special executive powers.” It was at this moment that Carter realized she was a marshal in name only and that he and Lovecraft might be a very long way up Shit Creek indeed with only a cocktail stick for a paddle.

  The questioning had taken a long time, but he and Lovecraft had come up with a story that was pretty much the truth except for skipping why the Germans had done what they did, and the British, and the Fomorians. Now Lovecraft had never ridden the snowmobile down the mountain by herself, and they had no idea how that scientist’s neck had come to be broken. Guess it was just a freak effect of the blast. It could hardly have been them, after all; they’d admitted straight up about Carter having shot Decker, so why lie about the dead woman? How do you break somebody’s neck with your bare hands, anyway? You see it in films, but that’s films. Wouldn’t it take a lot of strength? I mean, her head was cranked around by maybe 150 degrees. How can a person do that? Why would anyone do that when they had a perfectly good gun in their hands and had solid grounds of self-defense to use it?

  The marshal made some notes and moved on.

  When they arrived in Anchorage, they went through the whole thing again. “We told all this to the marshal back on Adak,” complained Lovecraft to the detective taking her statement. “Why can’t you guys coordinate more?”

  “What marshal on Adak?” said the detective.

  Finally, they had been shipped back to Arkham on the university’s dime. They got the impression that the university was long used to shipping staff back from disastrous expeditions. Certainly the procedures seemed to be well practiced.

  Carter was offered his job in campus security back, but he regretfully declined, privately citing to the sarge bad associations with the place as his main reason. The sarge said he was sorry Carter wouldn’t be returning, but he could understand that. They parted with a handshake and a promise to have a drink sometime that they both knew would never be honored.

  Lovecraft returned to her house and didn’t go into her study for three days. She kept thinking over what she could remember of her ancestor’s stories. Keziah Mason, Asenath Waite (she recalled the occupants of Waite’s Bill and knew the name was no coincidence), Wilbur Whateley: two witches and a wizard. What they had in common was forbidden knowledge. She had always pictured them poring over ancient manuscripts, fiddling about with dead frogs and alembics, doing all the wizard stuff, like they were at Hogwarts.

  Lovecraft paused at this thought; the absence of the Harry Potter books in the Unfolded World had deprived her of any number of cultural references.

  Like Hogwarts, then, whatever that was. But now she saw it wasn’t true. Yes, there was a surface veneer of plain or only lightly coded information in the Necronomicon, but its true power was what swam beneath the textual surface. Ideas, connections, paradigms, all ticking away, hidden between the lines, between the words, between the letters, just waiting for somebody to be stupid enough to look at them in the right way or the wrong way and for the knowledge to squirt up from the page, in through the eyes, and fuck up the reader for all eternity. Lovecraft had thought she was sitting down to read the Unfolded World’s Monster Manual, and instead turned herself into a witch. Nicely played, Emily. You’re the champ.

  The proof of it was inside her study and she feared those lengths of string crisscrossing the room more than she had ever feared anything else in her life. She had been blasé about the Fomorians. An intelligent species, entirely alien to humanity, and she had plowed into the middle of them like she’d been playing a first-person shooter. Even now, she could not think of them with anything other than a sense of pity. Stupid cannon-fodder in somebody else’s war. Who that somebody or something or whatever might turn out to be was probably a bad thing. She’d find out eventually, though. Her options now consisted entirely of playing the game or killing herself. If the Necronomicon had done as big a job on her as its reputation suggested, she couldn’t even be sure the latter course would be permanent. So, play the game, then. There, just on the other side of the Fold, was the promised land. She had promised it to herself, and she was going to get there somehow. Now she and Carter knew there were other players, probably lots of them, and this wasn’t a game where the losers got a pat on the back and commiserations. This was to the death, or something like it, and in this game, knowledge was a weapon.

  On the fourth day back, the news broke. The British Admiralty regretted to report that the hunter-killer submarine HMS Alacrity had been lost with all hands while on maneuvers in the Atlantic. They went into no further details, for “operational reasons.”

  For her sake, for Carter’s, and for the Folded World, she could not afford to go unarmed. Emily Lovecraft opened the door to her study, and entered.

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR

  Carter had invested in blinds for his office in Red Hook. Business was currently moribund, the case-related e-mails and mail he had f
ound on his return consisting of the tying up of old work. There was an unexpected check from Miskatonic U, an ex gratia payment for his service and actions in the defense of the university staff in the Aleutians. He put it to one side. He would find a suitable charity to give the money to. He could never take it himself without the shade of Nick Bowles haunting his conscience.

  What else, then? The casework cleared, he found an e-mail from Harrelson complaining that he had tried to write to Carter several times while he was on Attu, but the settlement’s bandwidth restrictions had meant his e-mail had bounced thanks to the size of its hefty attachment. After the Jenner incident, Harrelson had looked into the background behind the removal of Dave Koznick from his job at the high-energy physics lab after he suffered some sort of breakdown, the incident that precipitated Jenner’s little piece of domestic terrorism.

  Harrelson had found nothing unusual in Koznick’s record and Koznick himself was currently still in a mental health facility as he was considered a danger to himself. Harrelson concluded that, in his professional nonmedical opinion, Koznick was just a regular Joe who’d had a stress-related breakdown thanks to holding down multiple jobs. If Carter wanted to draw his own conclusions, Harrelson had helpfully if illegally scanned and attached the report to the e-mail.

  Carter looked at the face of Dave Koznick and recognized him as the ghost he had seen in the lab.

  Of course it was. He realized he’d suspected it right from the first. Some sort of bleed across the Fold, maybe? Over there, Koznick was having an easy time in his job. No Nazis to watch over, no weird science, no Arkham, no Miskatonic U. Just good old Clave College in good old Providence, and that one freaky night where he thought he saw—just for a second—the ghost of a security guard. Man, these empty buildings can get to you sometimes if you let them.

  Carter went to the window and looked out across the parking lot and into the dull New York afternoon, overcast and drizzling steadily. He wondered, not for the first time, if he was truly insane by now. He was sure he knew truths that no one else knew. Wasn’t that how some insane people thought? He sensed things others didn’t, felt things others didn’t, saw things …

  He had no idea which sense warned him. His hackles did not rise in anything but the metaphorical sense, his ears did not keen, no prickling sixth sense troubled him, and yet he suddenly knew.

  He turned to look at his desk.

  “Hello, Mr. Carter,” said Weston. He was sitting on the client’s side of the desk, wearing an overcoat, his briefcase across his knee, and his hat on the desktop. He seemed to be bone-dry.

  Carter took a breath through his mouth and exhaled it through his nose. He walked back to his desk, and sat.

  Weston smiled, a sketch of an expression, and opened his briefcase. “I have a job for you.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to extend my thanks to the folk at Thomas Dunne Books and Tor who first asked me, “Oi, Howard. Fancy writing something Lovecraftian?” in the first place, Peter Joseph and Brendan Deneen (who is my editor this time around, so thanks for that, too). Also, my thanks and appreciation to my agent, Melissa Chinchillo of Fletcher & Company, for her enthusiasm and general feistiness in representing my work to a slightly baffled world. I’d also like to thank Susannah Noel, because copyeditors don’t get enough love for the shine they bring to prose, and Justin Saber and Matthew Gray for having my back during a difficult time.

  When the first book in this series, Carter & Lovecraft, was published, it was dedicated to my father, Noel, who died in 2014. It feels a grim irony to dedicate the sequel to the memory of my mother, Enid, who followed him into the shadows two years and three weeks later. Grief is a strange thing, and I find myself not only grieving for my mother as an individual, but also for the gestalt entity “my parents” that was wounded by the loss of my father, and is now gone altogether. That is in no way to diminish her as an individual, however; I loved my mother dearly. She was good-humored, tenacious, generous, self-deprecatory, and, remarkably, endearingly practical. I have many, many good memories of her. I miss you terribly, Mum.

  JLH

  April 2017

  ALSO BY JONATHAN L. HOWARD

  THE LOVECRAFT SERIES

  Carter & Lovecraft

  THE JOHANNES CABAL SERIES

  Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

  Johannes Cabal the Detective

  Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

  The Brothers Cabal

  The Fall of the House of Cabal

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  Katya’s World

  Katya’s War

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jonathan L. Howard is a game designer, scriptwriter, and a veteran of the computer-games industry since the early nineties, with titles such as the Broken Sword series to his credit. He is the author of the Johannes Cabal series and Carter & Lovecraft, as well as the YA novels Katya’s World and Katya’s War. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and daughter. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1:        UNTERNEHMEN SONNENUNTERGANG

  Chapter 2:        THE UNFOLDED WORLD

  Chapter 3:        THE LAWMAN

  Chapter 4:        THE CLIENT

  Chapter 5:        HELIUM ICE

  Chapter 6:        CONSTABLE CARTER

  Chapter 7:        NECRONOMICON

  Chapter 8:        THE HAUNTED PALACE OF SCIENCE

  Chapter 9:        THE NECESSARY TOOL

  Chapter 10:      INSIDE THE MACHINE

  Chapter 11:      MASTERS OF DESTINY

  Chapter 12:      THE WEED OF CRIME …

  Chapter 13:      PROPERTY RETURNED

  Chapter 14:      LOST COUNTRIES

  Chapter 15:      2D, 3D, 4D, nD

  Chapter 16:      … BEARS BITTER FRUIT

  Chapter 17:      THE CASTLE ON THE HILL

  Chapter 18:      THE JOURNEY WEST

  Chapter 19:      BURNING BLOOD, BURNING BONES

  Chapter 20:      THE DARK ISLANDS

  Chapter 21:      THE DOME

  Chapter 22:      A VIEW FROM MOUNT TERRIBLE

  Chapter 23:      DARK WATERS

  Chapter 24:      BLACK SAND

  Chapter 25:      THE SECRET INVASION

  Chapter 26:      FANCY SHOOTIN’

  Chapter 27:      COLD BLOOD

  Chapter 28:      RED AND WHITE

  Chapter 29:      GOING HOT

  Chapter 30:      WORLDS WAR THREE

  Chapter 31:      A HIGHER AUTHORITY

  Chapter 32:      A DANGEROUS INTELLECTUAL

  Chapter 33:      CASE SEIDR

  Chapter 34:      BAMF WITH A BOOMSTICK

  Chapter 35:      BROTHER AND SISTER

  Chapter 36:      THE TROUBLE WITH EMILY

  Chapter 37:      FRAGMENTS IN THE AFTERMATH

  The Banality of Evil

  In Shallow Water

  Lovecraft’s Art Project

  Another Day, Another Dollar

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jonathan L. Howard

  About the Author

  Copyrigh
t

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan L. Howard. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by Ervin Serrano

  Cover illustrations: pattern © DVARG/Shutterstock.com; skull © To Darina/Shutterstock.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Howard, Jonathan L., author.

  Title: After the end of the world / Jonathan L. Howard.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025195 | ISBN 978-1-250-06090-7 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4668-6666-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Conspiracies—Fiction. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Fantasy fiction. | Dystopias.

  Classification: LCC PR6108.O928 A69 2017 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025195

  eISBN 9781466866669

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: November 2017

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  C hapter 1: U NTERNEHMEN S ONNENUNTERGANG